in a smaller tower shuttered and put away there
by possibilist
Summary: 'The breeze is cool against your neck. Santana and Brittany smile and lock pinkies and decide you look older now, more sophisticated, and they say it in a way that makes it seem like you haven't been sophisticated all along, like you haven't lived and died an infinite number of times, like you didn't age centuries in one moment.' Faberry drabble, Season 2 onward.


summary: 'The breeze is cool against your neck. Santana and Brittany smile and lock pinkies and decide you look older now, more sophisticated, and they say it in a way that makes it seem like you haven't been sophisticated all along, like you haven't lived and died an infinite number of times, like you didn't age centuries in one moment.' Faberry drabble, Season 2 onward.

an (1): because glee wasn't horrible tonight, but mostly to hold you over until actual faberry is back on :)

an (2): title and quote from john ashbery's "37 haiku." references from _the crying of lot 49 _by thomas pynchon. listen to coeur de pirate's "francis" if you'd like.

...

in a smaller tower shuttered and put away there

.

_you lay aside your hair like a book that is too important to read now_

_the dreams descend like cranes on guilded, forgetful wings_

_all in all we were taking our time, the sea returned_

...

You think of Rapunzel in the elevator. Santana and Brittany are literally leading you from a tower—the thirty-first floor of a hotel you're not supposed to leave—and you take a cab to a nearby hairdresser's, although you could've walked.

No one is here to rescue you, though, not a single person. Sometimes you're very sure that there is nothing worth rescuing, nothing worth salvaging, that you will go on forever as an unloveable creature, some specter, a gruesome _jamais vu_.

You're nervous, though, and you feel _something, _which is new. The hairdresser, a trendy, grey-haired man named Roman, asks what you're looking for. You glance in the mirror and almost say, Myself, but instead you shrug.

You don't know how to search for a ghost.

He cuts your hair to just below your jaw, because you have such a classic jawline, such high cheekbones, such a demure nose. He says, "You look beautiful," and you know that this is not hyperbole, and that this is not untrue. You do look beautiful.

The breeze is cool against your neck. Santana and Brittany smile and lock pinkies and decide you look older now, more sophisticated, and they say it in a way that makes it seem like you haven't been sophisticated all along, like you haven't lived and died an infinite number of times, like you didn't age centuries in one moment.

(You gave your child away).

You go through the motions and thank everyone when they tell you how cute or pretty or nice or different you look. You are all of these things. They do not matter. You are trapped and you only climb higher.

You get home and Judy takes one look at you and then says, "Oh, Quinn," and it would, in some context, be comforting, except for she sounds disappointed instead of sympathetic. She walks up to you and runs her hand through your hair, touches the back of your neck with a frown.

You clench your jaw. You go to your room. You don't cry, but you hear Judy sniveling downstairs, through the vent.

You jam headphones into your ears—there are so many things she would cry about if she _really _knew—and you strip off your dress, put on a pair of jeans and pinch your stomach a number of times, _hard, _before yanking your headphones out and pulling one of Frannie's Stanford t-shirts over your head.

Judy is still crying, harder now. You jam the buds back in and turn the volume all the way up. You listen to Coeur de Pirate even though you don't know French that well.

You rest your hand against your empty stomach. You pick up _The Crying of Lot 49, _one of numerous books on your shelf your father would burn if he was here.

Your chest hurts, aches acutely. There is no need to lock the door. Your hair falls forward, ghosting along your cheeks and obscuring your vision.

You think of Rapunzel but you understand her only in terms Pynchon's postmodernism: _What really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear to examine this formless magic, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the night of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?_

The next morning, you wake up and press your fingers into the super-fine hairs on the back of your neck. You take a shower and curl your hair a little. When you walk downstairs to make coffee before you go to church, Judy smiles. "You look even more like Grace Kelly now," she says.

At church you put on the blue robe and walk up to take your spot in the choir loft. You can't see out of the windows, stained-glass opaque with magic.

.

It's startling that your eyes are not broken.

You wake up for the first time, for the fiftieth time, for the _n_th time—_an infinite series_, you think. You are confused about what day it is, about whether or not anything you see is real, about dreams and medication, if you really are as depleted of blood as you think you remember.

(Your skin was so pale—maybe your eyes _are _broken—_later, possibly, she would have trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it._)

Santana grabs your hand gently, wrenching your dancing fingers from the side of your head. "Don't mess with that," she says, and you realize she is talking about the monitor in your brain.

"Tell me again," you say. Your own voice sounds foreign.

Santana shakes her head.

"Please."

"You broke two vertebrae in your back," she whispers, ashamed, like it's a secret she wants to keep from you. You remember you cannot feel your legs and you check again—you still cannot feel them. Santana continues, "Seven of your ribs broke. They hurt your lung." She squeezes your hand. "Your brain was bleeding because you fractured your skull."

"How many times?"

Santana shrugs. "Too many to count."

You press your head into the pillow to see if you can feel any pain. You do, the kind that causes your world to bottom out and spin, and you feel sick and disoriented, like you're getting off the tea cups in Disneyland. You close your eyes—to fight, an impulse even as you're exhausted—and when you open them a strange thing has occurred: light from the open window has managed to hit a tiny crystal charm Brittany left hanging from your IV pole, and it prisms colours all over the white walls: rainbows, waves, and you're inside a kaleidoscope, a complete miracle of nature.

"Is this real?" you ask.

"Yeah." Santana smiles. "Yeah, Quinn. This is real."

.

The second time you go to visit Rachel in New York, it is October. For some reason, probably because it's rainy, you are painfully sore; none of this is something you're unsure of; you have unresolved nerve damage, scar tissue, and you can't stop limping.

Kurt looks at you sort of pitifully. You shoot him a glare, a raised eyebrow, but he knows you well enough by now that he just sighs.

Rachel doesn't notice, or she chooses not to bring it up. You sleep in her bed, though; she _refuses _to let you sleep on the floor.

The next morning at breakfast, Brody—a new guy, a _straight _guy, with a broad chest and bright smile—starts talking about a dance class, and warming up beforehand, and Rachel says, "Oh, Quinn's a dancer," like it's the simplest thing in the world.

You change into sweatpants and a loose t-shirt; you complain; Rachel laughs. You go to the studio, the classroom. You haven't been dancing formally at Yale—you've gone to a few classes here and there, but honestly (you hate this) you're still recovering, you're still struggling. Rachel smiles and giggles and does a few body rolls, then takes your hands and twirls you around.

Your physical therapist in Ohio said your ballet training was invaluable because of the muscle memory related to repetition of movement; this idea interests you in literature, especially in the sounds of Ashbery's and Ginsberg's and Bukowski's poems, so you understand.

Before you know it, Rachel—and the entire class, now filing in and stretching—has stilled and is watching you. A blond woman is standing in the doorway. You stop your own motion.

She stalks toward you. "Who are you?" she asks.

"My name is Quinn Fabray," you say.

"Do you go to NYADA?"

You shake your head. "Yale. I'm visiting Rachel." You throw your thumb over your shoulder in Rachel's general direction.

She stares at you for a few seconds longer. "You're formally trained."

You nod.

"You've been injured."

_What is it like, Oedipa, to be all alone in a nightmare like this? _you think. "Yes," you say.

The woman takes a deep breath, then lifts her head and turns to the main group of students. "I'm sorry to tell you all that Miss Quinn Fabray here is a better dancer than all of you."

You turn around quickly, your cheeks heating in a rare blush, to apologize to Rachel—your intentions were never to make a scene, to show anyone up in any way—but instead she's just smiling.

"I _told _you Quinn is a dancer," she tells Brody, then elbows you in the ribs lightly with a wink.

.

The fall of your junior year, you take a class on literary theory and Derrida; your professor—Dr. Bishop, a greying man with a mustache and bowties—tells you one day in his office hours that you should think about a literary theory program for graduate school.

Language, you've come to learn, is a key to this tower of magic: It locks you in; it is finite; it can never express all that you feel. But it is also the most special thing you know, the thing you understand best. It doesn't exist in the real, and you do, and that's a fabulous, ridiculous thing.

"I've been thinking about maybe examining the form of fractured narrative within postmodernism in terms of literary theory," you say.

This causes him to clasp his hands together with a grin. "You're one of the most gifted students I've had in a long time."

You are humble in this praise—humble and _humbled_, because you're at _Yale _and all you've really been doing in his class is doing your best to understand. To think.

"You've read _The Crying of Lot 49_, right?" he asks.

"_I'm the projector of the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes_," you quote.

"Quinn," he says, very seriously. "Please think about pursuing a doctorate when you're done here. In five, ten years, I can't imagine the advances you'll be capable of making."

You smile then—you had been fighting it, fighting the very real and unnamable joy flitting around your chest—and say, "I honestly think part of the reason I'm alive today is because of these texts."

He nods with a little laugh. He's not dismissing you, because it really is a beautiful and also sort of darkly funny paradox, which he understands. "A sentimental post-postmodernist," he says. "Brilliant."

.

Rachel likes to be the big spoon. You don't have to ask why—you never do, and she never offers explanation either—because you know that your mortality is concrete now, and she is comforted by your physical presence, by your breaths and your heartbeat, which you give to her infinitely.

Tonight Rachel runs her fingers over the tattoo on your ribs—_i am a part of all that i have met—_and then presses against the biggest scar, just above your tattoo, just hard enough that you gasp a little, just enough pressure to get through all of the damaged, toughened nerve endings there. "You're full of contradictions," she says.

You turn over so that you're facing her in the dark. "Very well, then. I am large. I contain multitudes," you say.

She rolls her eyes. "Tomorrow you'll receive a doctorate in the most depressing literature ever, and you're going to quote Whitman?"

You kiss her. "I can go with Pynchon if you prefer."

"Please don't."

"Plus, it's not contradictory all the way. _The dead really do persist_."

"I told you not to quote Pynchon."

"Sorry," you say softly, then, "You really think I'll get it? My doctorate?" It's shaky, unsure, so unlike yourself now. "I mean, this committee is incredible and I don't know if my defense is quite complete—"

"—Quinn," she says. She kisses you softly, gently. "I think they would've given you a PhD when you started the program had they been able to."

"I love you," you say.

Rachel smiles into the scar on your scalp, underneath your hair. "I love you, too." She kisses the little raised ridge of skin; even though she can't see it, she can feel it—it is real, and she knows exactly where it is.

.

When you are thirty-six years old, your daughter sits next to you on a beach in the Hamptons and asks why you have a snake up your back and down your ribs.

Emerson is starting first grade next week. She's the second-shortest child in her class, but she is by far the most advanced reader, and she loves to sing. She's showing promise as a gymnast and as a dancer; she's terrifyingly fearless, but she has incredible patience.

None of those things matter to you nearly as much as that she is absolutely the _kindest _human being you've ever witnessed on the planet—she will not squish ants on the sidewalk because "they could be someone's mom!"—and that she frowns like you when she's trying to figure something out, and that she laughs like Rachel.

You squint out at the claustrophobic infinity of the horizon. You think scars are most easily explained in the postmodern—_How long could it go on before collisions became a serious hinderance? There would have to be collisions—_but Emerson is six, and it is the last weekend of her summer, and you are on the beach at your Hamptons' house, and she is a child; she understands the world so much better than you.

"A long time ago," you say, and she snuggles further into your side, presses her nose into your ribs, "I got hurt. I was driving and another car hit my car."

Emerson doesn't move. You think she's holding her breath, but you can't be sure because of the breeze on your skin.

"The doctors had to help me, and so I have scars," you say.

"Do they hurt?" Emerson asks. She looks critically at the one along your ribs.

They do, sometimes, randomly, like your molecules just decide to revolt some days, stars that you try your hardest to assign into constellations. "Sometimes," you say. "But not too much."

She nods. There are a few freckles across her cheeks. Her eyes are hazel—not as green as yours, but flecked with gold.

Because she still doesn't grasp all of language, Emerson is _wise_: "Do they scare you?"

"Not anymore," you say.

Emerson tilts her head to look at you. Her deep brown, wavy hair is short—like _yours_, she insisted a few weeks ago; Rachel had cried a little when you'd taken her to get it cut, but she looks adorable—and says, "I just wanted to make sure because of Harry and Voldemort. I'm glad they're not _actually _snakes, just scars."

Your laugh is a little teary. You kiss the top of her head.

"Let's go," she says, then stands and tugs you along with her towards the lighthouse. Emerson inhabits the magic that used to trap you, and it is breathtaking. You lock your fingers together and spiral up the stairs to the top. You have to hold Emerson up so she can see out of the window; she points at ships as real wishes whenever the rotating light illuminates them, a planetarium on the ruffled surface of the ocean, sails floating like stars.


End file.
